My personal take:
Linux on my desktop: Of the various systems, it has a reasonable amount of GUI usability without beating your head into the wall. But on my linux box I use a zillion xterms, Opera, and Framemaker. Not much for specialty applications that need graphics.

Freebsd for my servers. It has a slight performance edge over openbsd, and a somewhat wider set of ports.

Openbsd for my firewall.

HOWEVER
There are a raft of things that can only be done on windows boxes. Linux has no equivalent of access; the word processors are at best mediocre; and

My personal take:
Linux on my desktop: Of the various systems, it has a reasonable amount of GUI usability without beating your head into the wall. But on my linux box I use a zillion xterms, Opera, and Framemaker. Not much for specialty applications that need graphics.

Freebsd for my servers. It has a slight performance edge over openbsd, and a somewhat wider set of ports.

Openbsd for my firewall.

HOWEVER
There are a raft of things that can only be done on windows boxes. Linux has no equivalent of access; the word processors are at best mediocre; and

OpenBSD Forever!

Linux actually has an awesome MS-WORD alternative: OpenOffice.org. It's so good I use it on Windows (On a machine I have been banned from fixing because I'm blamed for Microshit's bugs).

FreeBSD may have an advantage sometimes, but I personally go with OpenBSD every time no Wincrap users need direct access.

I'm thinking of making an OpenBSD-based Wincrap alternative (mixed-source: Anything from OpenBSD stays that way, anything I make is mine for a year, then rereleased under the GPL for a year, then finally property of the OpenBSD team)

I've been using my Powerbook for about 5 months now, and, frankly, it's FAR better than any other OS I've ever encountered. Far more polished and stable.
In addition, it's based on Unix, and has easy access to a Unix terminal, where there are MANY more advanced tricks available. It's also easy to port between OSX and Linux distributions.

One of my favorite aspects, though, is how the OS is built. Everything is EXTREMELY integrated, which can be both a good and a bad thing. In Windows, that means it's out of your reach. Completely. In OSX, that means that it's all easy to find, modify, and reference for your programs. There are many things that ONLY a Mac can do because of this, many more things that it can do far more easily and efficiently, and it can do effectively everything Windows or Unix can.
The smaller developer base is a blessing in disguise: less programs, true, but less incompetent developers. In Windows, a large portion of software out there isn't wanted or needed, and installs extra crap on your computer. I've come across TWO such instances on my Mac, out of several thousand, and they were easily (and completely) uninstalled.

I've been a Windows user all my life. I'm in college for a computer programming degree. Computers have effectively been my LIFE for over a decade.
And for the most part, I've switched to a Mac. Completely. My PC is mostly for gaming and programming, and I've been looking into C++ IDEs for Macs to replace that function as well. Because, face it, PCs DO have a hardware advantage.

stop smokin all that weed, and get those guys to write SOFTWARE. all they turn out is crap!
he needs to get the memo, within a decade, i think windows will be eradicated, but only if people get their heads out of their butts, and use an alterative. Linux and MacOSX are the best in my opinion.

As OS alternatives, I would recommend SuSE Linux, because it is quite foolproof, and if the hardware was still available, AmigaOne computers with AmigaOS 4. (there'll be new AmigaOne-compatible hardware later on this year, I hope this time I'll be able to get back to the Amiga community)

Solaris 10 is great as well, but can be difficult to install.

Slackware Linux was easy to install for me, but I'm familiar with a lot of different UNIX-like platforms.

I was really impressed with SuSE 9.0 when I installed it on my laptop, and I still recommend SuSE (among others).

At the moment our local Linux Users Group is evaluating several distributions to decide which we can recommend to Linux newbies. We'd like to agree on one distro that we can all install on a spare partition or a spare PC, so that when a new user has problems, several of us will be in a position to help.

(This came up because, a few months ago, we were embarassed when a new Ubuntu user couldn't get dial-up networking configured and asked us for help. None of us knew how to help, because none of us use Ubuntu.)

Mandriva Linux is a great way to introduce newbies to a non Micro$soft OS. I installed it on a home PC and it has turned my technophobic little sister into a fan overnight. It's streamlined and sleek under gnome, loaded with a great program set and mp3 support built in--take that Ubuntu Administration is a breeze too.

Another great Linux Distro is Sabayon Linux--I have had a lot of fun with it over the last couple of months. Very stylish, though a bit buggy in spots. I t comes with a pretty full program and codec set which makes the liveCD a bit more useful than many others and reduces the post-install downloads.

Oops, my blushes. I was supposed to report back "when we have a decision." Well, our Linux Users Group settled on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS late in that year; recently we've been installing Ubuntu 7.10, and I think we'll be switching to 8.04 LTS when it's released later this month.

I've been hearing some good early buzz from the beta testers about the next release of Mandriva. Come to think of it, wasn't that supposed to be released this month?